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Pearson airport: Home away from home for thousands

For many immigrants, Toronto’s airport has become both the gateway and departure point for a new way of life in Canada.

Kevin Veerasamy and Corina Salajan take a break at Pearson International Airport's Terminal 1. Both first arrived in Canada at Pearson about a decade ago, and for them, like thousands of other new Canadians, Pearson isn't just the gateway to a new life, it's what sustains it.
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Over the second half of Kevin Veerasamy’s life, the one that started the day he arrived in Canada from Mauritius, one place has loomed larger than any other: Pearson International Airport.

It’s where he first set foot on Canadian soil, and the place he now considers his community.

“I never dreamed of working at the airport,” he says. Yet, “I’ve been here for 11 years — it feels like my home. I spend most of my time here. I met my wife here.”

For thousands of new Canadians like Veerasamy, who is now a pre-boarding terminal manager, Pearson isn’t just the gateway to a new life, it’s what sustains it.

“This is its own community,” he says. “A pretty big one. It’s part of my life. The airport is part of my routine. It’s part of me. It’s my identity. It’s in my blood — too much, sometimes.”

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While thousands of travellers will pass fleetingly through Pearson this season, jetting to warm beaches or arriving for family reunions, thousands of others have a completely different experience with the airport.

Veerasamy has moved 12 times since his first entering Canada through Pearson in 2002. Each move has taken him closer to the airport, and he now lives in a part of Mississauga that’s just a stone’s throw away.

Much of Pearson’s workforce, in fact, lives in surrounding neighbourhoods.

For Corina Salajan, home is just south of the airport, in neighbouring Etobicoke. She’s taking a break inside Terminal 1 after screening the morning rush of holiday travellers.

Asked if the work sometimes takes her back to the day she first landed in Canada from her native Romania, she becomes emotional.

“I came in 2000, from Transylvania,” she says, wiping away tears. “I landed at Pearson. It was the fifth of May. I remember it; it was a nice day.”

Like Veerasamy, she got a job at Pearson not long after landing there.

“The family that assisted my family, they lived close by. We rented an apartment next to them. The woman worked for an airline and she asked me to give my resume.”

About 40,000 people are employed by 900 companies at Pearson. A further 185,000 jobs supported by the airport’s activities, according to the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.

Colleen Arnold, the Pearson-based regional director for global security firm Garda, speaks proudly about why so many of her company’s 1,500 employees at the airport are recent immigrants.

“It’s a very important job; they’re maintaining the safety and security of the traveling public. Many of the candidates are highly educated in the countries they’ve arrived from.”

Arnold says their language skills are a big asset when working with clientele passing through from all over the world.

“I also think it’s important for a company to reflect the city it’s doing business in. Toronto’s one of the most diverse cities in the world, and we have employees from several dozen countries.”

Employees, she says, are well compensated for what they offer.

Both Veerasamy and Salajan have professional backgrounds. Veerasamy is an architectural designer, but after a brief stint working for a firm here, he found the airport offered more opportunity. Salajan is a mechanical engineer. With all the hurdles to employment facing foreign-trained engineers, she didn’t even try to find a job in her field because she needed to start earning immediately to help support her family.

Many of the immigrant employees at the airport said they live close by simply because that’s where they originally settled when they arrived, or because their ethnic community — most notably enclaves of South Asians — has put down Canadian roots in the area.

It’s a common development: London’s Heathrow airport, for example, has also prompted the emergence of large immigrant neighbourhoods in nearby areas such as Southall and Hounslow.

Arnold points out that, like any major international airport, Pearson has to run like a Swiss watch, otherwise an entire network of globally connected systems and operations collapses. That means there are big advantages to having a workforce living close by.

That’s why, “when we have job fairs, we hold them near the airport.”

“We can’t afford to have staff running late because they’re commuting from far away in bad traffic or bad weather. It’s very beneficial if they live around the corner.”

Arnold’s own commute is just 10 to 15 minutes.

Meyer Burstein, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada who now consults on immigration policy and analysis, says recent data explains why immigrant groups have found the airport vicinity a good place to settle rather than the urban centre.

It’s a result of “push factors,” Burstein suggests: “immigrants not settling as much near the core of metropolitan cities because of housing costs, congestion and lack of opportunity.

“I would say, in the last decade or so, we’re seeing that increasing.”

Pearson potentially represents a big economic growth opportunity for many immigrant groups, he says. “It’s not just the direct jobs at Pearson, it’s also all the peripheral ones.”

Awad Hassan is a perfect example.

“When I came to Toronto from Somalia in 1991, I landed in Pearson,” he recalls. “The Somali community in those days was established downtown.”

Now, Hassan says, a Somali community has swelled in the Dixon Rd. and Kipling Ave. area, just east of the airport, in large part because of the availability of employment.

Hassan has worked for companies that rely entirely on airport business, such as car rental shops, and now works as a valet parking attendant right in the terminals.

“I first landed in this airport, and now I work in this airport. Most of my community works at the airport, or for industries close to the airport. This is where the jobs are.”

For Karam Singh Punian, Pearson has become a family affair: six members of his immediate family work there, and his wife did for almost 20 years.

Punian is an airport limousine driver, part of an industry dominated in recent years by Punjabi-Canadians. He has lived in neighbouring Malton, and now in Brampton.

Many immigrants from Punjab, in northwestern India, originally settled next to the airport in Malton and Rexdale, and four Sikh gurdwaras have since been built in the area around Pearson, helping to solidify the community’s presence.

“Many in (the Punjabi) community now also work in other industries around the airport — trucking, warehousing, logistics,” Punian says.

Veerasamy says his arrival at Pearson in 2002 wasn’t what he was expecting.

“Coming from Mauritius (a multiracial, multi-ethnic island nation in the southwest Indian Ocean), we have a certain idea of how a foreign country is,” he explains.

“When I landed in Pearson, I didn’t expect to see people like me working there. I said: Hmmm, there’s everything. It feels like back home. It was familiar, reassuring.”

A decade later, as travellers rush through Pearson, preoccupied with their holiday plans, Veerasamy draws a contrast with his more permanent life there.

“It’s an irony. I never expected to land here, then work in the same place. For me, like a lot of people who work here, Pearson is a really big part of our lives.”

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